bech32 addresses beginning with “bcrt…” on regtest

Question

I'm playing around with regtest and wanted to generate a bech32 address. My Bitcoin Core version is 0.18.0.

I ran getnewaddress "" bech32 and got an address that began with bcrt, like this one : bcrt1qs758ursh4q9z627kt3pp5yysm78ddny6txaqgw.

I'm a bit surprised, because I was thinking that testnet bech32 addresses were different, and indeed I checked this page that says it should begin with tb1...

I tried to send some tbtc to this address with Electrum and a faucet, none worked, they indeed both say address is invalid.

So what am I missing here?

Answer 1

Regtest and testnet are different networks. They are not compatible with each other.

Regtest is a private local network which is used solely for testing. It is primarily used for the regression tests, hence the name regtest.

Testnet is the public testing network which is very similar to mainnet, the main network. It has a different genesis block and has actual miners, DNS seeds, and nodes that you can connect to.